SAP Introduces new Business Process Certification

SAP announced a new certification process for business process management experts. Sessions for certification will include: will include sessions on strategic context, governance, methodology, technology, and service-oriented architecture. The certification will also be offered online though the SAP Business Process Expert social network. Find out more about this program here at IT World Canada.

Toyota Motor Europe Selects Active Endpoints

Toyota motor announced, as reported in this article from market watch, that they have been able to successfully use ActiveVOS. According to the article

An application orchestrated by ActiveVOS enables users to more readily access Toyota's sales education curriculum, guaranteeing that the education is widely used within the company and that each student's progress is tracked.

In response to the news, Eric Egertson, VP of Sales for Active Endpoints stated:

“We are pleased that Toyota Motor Europe selected Active Endpoints to develop their SOA applications. Modernizing important systems like learning management to take advantage of ActiveVOS's business process management (BPM) and workflow capabilities delivers immediate return on investment."

IBM Proposed Acquisition of ILOG

IBM and ILOG have signed an agreement today, whereby IBM will acquire ILOG for approximately EUR 215 million or $340 million in U.S. currency. The goal of this acquisition is for IBM to advance their BPM and SOA technologies with ILOGs Business Rules Management Systems software which will:

“enable IBM to help clients deliver critical business information in real-time, allowing them to make better business decisions faster.”

As also mentioned in this article from Fox Businesses:

“When completed, the acquisition of ILOG will strengthen IBM's BPM and SOA position by providing customers a full set of rule management tools for complete information and application lifecycle management across a comprehensive platform including IBM's leading WebSphere application development and management platform.”

This acquisition still has some hurdles to navigate since there are several prerequisites pending. The public tender offers still have to be reviewed to determine if they violate U.S. or EU antitrust laws, and are also contingent on a 66.67% share capital and voting rights minimum. In France, the offer is awaiting approval from the AMF and French Ministry of Economy.

Austin Energy Uses BPM to Improve Services

At Austin Energy, they were having problems achieving a level of service where they could attend properly to all of their service calls filtering in. Intelligent Enterprise took a look at their story here. So, with no BMP suite, they made improvements to their service oriented architecture company-wide in order to improve services. They started out by defining what the requirements of the software had to be and the benefits they wished to receive from the software.

Since they were unable to efficiently answer all phone calls, they streamlined the five different tools they used while communicating with customers over the phone. This alone provided a huge drop in the average call time. Customer service went from servicing 4,000 calls a day to 20,000 calls a day.

Software AG Report

Software Ag, published a report on Best Practices for SOA Governance User Survey. The reason for creating a report was to determine which ways organizations are approaching the process of implementing SOA governance. The study is especially relevant with SOA beginning to have an increased role in BPM. Some of the findings that were revealed in the report include:

- Interest in SOA was widespread as only one industry out of 14 reported that more than 15% of its respondents had “no plans to adopt SOA”.

- Top drivers for SOA adoption were a desire to improve business agility, simplify integration, and support business process management (BPM) initiatives.

- SOA has yet to expand far beyond the firewall as only a small minority (19.5%) report having exposed more than a quarter of their existing services externally.

- There was a strong correlation between SOA maturity and governance adoption with more than 80% of enterprises having a fully-implemented SOA in place calling their governance practices “mature” or “adequate” versus 33% overall.

While these findings are formulated across several large enterprises, what is your opinion on SOA governance in you respective organization?